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Oatmeal Bread (One quart of boiling water)
One quart of boiling water on three cups oatmeal. When cool pour in one-half cup molasses, one teaspoon salt, shortening size of small egg, one cake Fleischmann's yeast dissolved in lukewarm water, enough flour to make bread dough. This makes three loaves.
— Mrs. E. C. Titus
A plain molasses-and-oatmeal loaf of the kind that fed a household for a week. The receipt assumes you know how bread behaves, so the missing numbers are the flour, the rising times and the oven.
- Cool means under 110FThe scalded oatmeal must drop to lukewarm before the yeast goes in, or the yeast dies. This is the one step that decides whether the recipe works at all; a quart of hot cereal takes an hour or more to come down, so start it well ahead.
- What kind of oatmealIn this period "oatmeal" most often meant rolled oats, though coarser cut oats were still in use. Rolled oats will absorb the quart of water and give a soft crumb; steel-cut oats stay gritty unless the soak runs several hours.
- One cake of yeastA Fleischmann's cake was compressed fresh yeast. Cake sizes varied, the familiar small one running about six-tenths of an ounce, so any equivalence is approximate; one packet or 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry yeast is the usual modern substitute, proofed in a quarter cup of lukewarm water.
- Shortening the size of a small eggSomewhere between two and four tablespoons; period conversions for "the size of an egg" vary. Lard or butter both suit the loaf; the fat is there for keeping quality more than flavor.
- Enough flourThe flour is unstated and cannot be pinned down from what is given; work by feel, adding a cup at a time until the dough pulls from the bowl but still tacks slightly to the hand. Three loaves' worth will take a good deal of it. Oatmeal doughs stay softer than white ones, and overflouring gives a dry, crumbly loaf.
- Rising and shapingKnead eight to ten minutes, rise until doubled (about 1 1/2 hours in a warm room), divide into three, pan, and let rise again until the dough crowns the rim, 45 minutes to an hour.
- Oven375F for 40 to 45 minutes in three 8x4-inch pans. Molasses browns fast, so tent the tops with foil if they darken before the centers reach 195F.
Oatmeal bread belongs to the long tradition of stretching wheat flour with a cheaper cooked grain — a habit that survived in home kitchens well past the point of necessity because the loaf simply keeps better and stays moist longer than a straight white bread. The molasses is doing double duty here: it sweetens, it darkens the crumb, and it feeds the yeast, which mattered when yeast was less reliable than it is now. The specific naming of Fleischmann's dates the receipt to the era of the branded compressed yeast cake, sold from the 1870s onward and delivered fresh to grocers, which came to stand alongside the homemade salt-rising and hop-yeast starters earlier cooks had to keep alive themselves, and which persisted for decades yet. Community cookbooks like this one collected such receipts under a contributor's name, and Mrs. Titus's three loaves is a fair index of household size and baking day rhythm.